Humans exhibit distinct characteristics compared to our primate and ancient hominin ancestors. To investigate genomic bursts in the evolution of these traits, we use two complementary approaches to examine enrichment among genome-wide association study loci spanning diseases and AI-based image-derived brain, heart, and skeletal tissue phenotypes with genomic regions reflecting four evolutionary divergence points. These regions cover epigenetic differences among humans and rhesus macaques, human accelerated regions (HARs), ancient selective sweeps, and Neanderthal-introgressed alleles.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFElectronic health records are often incomplete, reducing the power of genetic association studies. For some diseases, such as knee osteoarthritis where the routine course of diagnosis involves an X-ray, image-based phenotyping offers an alternate and unbiased way to ascertain disease cases. We investigated this by training a deep-learning model to ascertain knee osteoarthritis cases from knee DXA scans that achieved clinician-level performance.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe human skeletal form underlies bipedalism, but the genetic basis of skeletal proportions (SPs) is not well characterized. We applied deep-learning models to 31,221 x-rays from the UK Biobank to extract a comprehensive set of SPs, which were associated with 145 independent loci genome-wide. Structural equation modeling suggested that limb proportions exhibited strong genetic sharing but were independent of width and torso proportions.
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